The Missing Room

Greetings.

I chose to make my first post in this forum because it seemed like more of a general knowledge question than a request for a hint or tip.

My nasty halfling rogue - Brando Hillburrow, by name - managed to acquire an outdated map of the Tarant sewers, and decided to use it to root out all the hard-to-find nooks and crannies located therein. While doing so, he couldn't help but notice that a short stretch of tunnel and a single connected chamber had been walled off from the rest of the sewers so no point of access remained. Brando's efforts to blow a hole in the new wall with explosives failed to create an opening, and he also failed to locate any entrance on the surface in the approximate location of the mysterious chamber.

Has anyone noticed this room, and succeeded in entering it? Does it still exist, or was it filled in when the sewers were reconfigured?

I'd offer thanks on Brando's behalf, but they would be insincere.

 

I suppose you mean this room? It's not in the game, I believe it was removed when the map (the actual level) was redesigned, along with the passages on the sides. The tunnels were removed most likely for balance reasons, to make the sewers harder to explore. I guess, we can fix the map in the unofficial patch in order to prevent confusion.

EDIT: Done. Here's the corrected map that will be included in the UAP. Notice the changes in the small sewers.

 

Yep, those are the ones.

I'm not sure it's necessary to erase them from the map, though, since the map is not supposed to be completely accurate. If I remember correctly, the map depicts the sewers as they were when they were first built.

 

I wasn't able to find any evidence in the game that suggests that the sewers were redesigned. Moreover, if I was in charge of a sewer system, I won't be blocking passages instead of expanding them. These changes make sense only from a gameplay point of view, as they just make sewers harder to explore, by removing shortcuts. And finally, many areas in the game were redesigned several times throughout the development cycle, and there's a high chance that the developers just forgot about the city plans when making these alterations. There were several townmaps (maps that show local areas) in the game that still had older layouts, so it's no wonder.

Feel free to prove me otherwise, though.

 

You may be right - I'll go back and check it out again. I seem to remember the guy from the Underground mentioning that the map was out of date.

The only solid evidence I can think of at the moment is that there are other areas of the sewers that don't exactly match the map. I'm thinking in particular of the one big room in the lower middle of the map that is walled into snaking corridors instead of being an open area.

In any case, I'd be sad to see the missing room vanish completely. It was interesting and mysterious to find a room on the map that was apparently inaccessable. I actually spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out whether or not I could get in. And the thing is, you'd never find it unless you went through that area of the sewers while constantly referencing the map.

I guess others may see things differently, though.

 

Just from memory I would say the sewers are fairly close to scale. It'd be more effort than I'm willing to expend to figure out whether or not they're exactly to scale though. Certainly you can compare where the entrances are an match them up with locations on the surface.

The bandits do seem detached, don't they? It seems rather odd that they just attack you on sight like mindless rats. Too bad.

 

I agree, I just assumed they were associated with some questline I never found.

Disappointing to find out that they weren't.

 

I just did the Underground mission to acquire the map again, and the Underground rep definitely refers to it as "the old map" of the sewers, presumably to distinguish it from the new, current map (wherever that might be).

 

Thaddeus refers to it as the "old city plans". That doesn't say much, since although the document may be "old" (as in it was made long time ago), there's no mention that the sewers were altered/redesigned.

 

Except that the "old city plans" differ from the actual layout in a couple of areas, which suggests the old plans are no longer current.

I simply don't see the difference between the actual map and the old plans as a mistake. It makes story sense. Otherwise why not simply steal "the plans" instead of "the old plans"?

 

It would have be really cool, if the missing room, was part of a quest.

Example: The government asks the PC to find an enclave of Evil Mages, who wants to destroy the Good government and to replace it with an Evil Magocratic government. The PC get the old city plans, and find out that there is a room, that was not mentioned on the new plans. Now the PC has to find out, a way to get in the missing room.